STYLE (excerpt)
by Charles Bukowski
Style is the answer to everything
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous
thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable
to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what
I call art…
Photo: Hans Silvester, from his book Natural Fashion (see description from on the book’s Amazon page).
RIVER
Poem by Tamara Madison
In dreams my roads fill
with clear sweet water
flowing gently; there is nothing
to carry, I can swim
beyond the flooded buildings,
through countryside covered
with this vast river
to anywhere I need to go
where warm cool water lifts,
surrounds me; it is silver,
it is gray, it has no color, it shines
like fish, is dark and soft
like sleep. When I wake
the bell pricks like pins
and I want that water
to fill my veins and carry me
on that river back to sleep.
Note: “River” and two other poems by Tamara Madison will be featured in the upcoming Silver Birch Press release SILVER: An Anthology of Eclectic Poetry & Prose.
Photo: “The Tetons and the Snake River” (1942) by Ansel Adams
I recently visited the website of Adam Jahiel, and enjoyed reviewing the breathtaking photos from his book The Last Cowboy.
During the past two decades, Jahiel shot the photographs as he spent months at a time living among the men who live on the range. In a recent Huffington Post article, Jahiel remarked, “It is a culture that has dwindled and almost disappeared through the years right in front of my camera.”
The Last Cowboy — 158 pages in hardcover or softcover — is available at blurb.com.
On August 31, 2012, look up into the sky and catch a glimpse of the last blue moon until July 2015! As lovers of lunar trivia know, a blue moon is the second full moon in the same calendar month. (The month’s other full moon occurred on August 2nd.)
Let’s celebrate by featuring a favorite tune about the moon. (Lyrics listed below — just sing along in your mind. I know you know this tune — first published in 1934.)
BLUE MOON
by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart
Blue moon,
you saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own.
Blue moon,
you knew just what I was there for
you heard me saying a prayer for
somebody I realy could care for.
And then there suddenly appeared before me,
the only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper, “Please adore me.”
and when I looked,
the moon had turned to gold.
Blue moon,
now I’m no longer alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love of my own.
Photo: Marius G. Mihalache, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Tonight (or should I say this morning) I’ve been looking at images from Natural Fashion, a book of photographs by Hans Silvester — and can say without reservation that these are some of the most beautiful, surprising photographs I’ve ever seen.
Here is the description from the Amazon page:
In this stunning collection of photographs, Hans Silvester celebrates the unique art of the Surma and Mursi tribes of the Omo Valley, on the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. These nomadic people have no architecture or crafts with which to express their innate artistic sense. Instead, they use their bodies as canvases, painting their skin with pigments made from powdered volcanic rock and adorning themselves with materials obtained from the world around them—such as flowers, leaves, grasses, shells and animal horns. The adolescents of the tribes are especially adept at this art, and Silvester’s superb photographs show many youths who, imbued with an exquisite sense of color and form, have painted their beautiful bodies with colorful dots, stripes and circles, and encased themselves in elaborate arrangements of vegetation and found objects. This art is endlessly inventive, magical and, above all, fun. In his brief text, Sylvester worries that as civilization encroaches on this largely unexplored region, these people will lose their delightful tradition. 160 color photographs.
Silver Birch Press 